Elastic N.V. (ESTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, and welcome to this introduction to Elastic Enterprise Search. You are looking for more information about Elastic Enterprise search, part fits in with the Elastic Stack and where it fits in with our other solutions and how it can add value to the organization, then you've come to the right place. My name is Tim, I'm a solutions architect with Elastic, and I'm based in Johannesburg in South Africa. So let's begin by asking a question and ask yourself this question. How many times have you searched today? Maybe you classify searching as going on to a search engine and typing in a phrase or word that you're looking for, the name of a movie and heading into. But in reality, you probably searched a lot more times than you really think because why do you would have take that searching and call it finding? Well, when you call it finding then you're doing it a lot more often than just using a search engine, so we're often looking for things like we're tracking parcels or we might be looking for information on an internal tool that our company uses. Maybe we're just even looking for the nearest outlet of a coffee shop that we like. If you really look at finding that really becomes far more pervasive than just searching. And if you think about the times that you've tried to find information today, when you've maybe been looking for something and haven't been able to find the answer that you're looking for or maybe it was tricky to use the finding or searching mechanism. Your frustration could potentially have gone up, and that frustration would be then associated with the company or the service that you were trying to find that information on. So you can see that this ability to find information and to search for things is really critical to every interaction that you have in your daily life. So by that same token, everyone is trying to find something. So not only yourself but also your customers and partners. They're trying to find things on your website, in your app, maybe in a marketplace. They're looking for answers in a help center or they're may be looking for things to buy on your catalog. So there's valuable information in every single tool that you deploy. And the tools that companies deploy is really growing because as digital transformation takes hold, the channels through which companies engage with their customers is just growing exponentially over time. So having the ability to find information through all of these channels is really important. So to that point, if it's really important, what happens if people can't find what they're looking for. So here are some statistics to come and bear that out. In terms of customer experiences, great search experiences can help either make or break your customer relationships. So 34% of customers are frustrated at not being able to find answers to simple questions on company websites or apps. 88% of online visitors say that they won't return to a website or an app after a bad experience. And $1.6 trillion is lost in the U.S. every year to deploy customer service. And that $1.6 trillion doesn't vanish or evaporate, it goes to competitors. 90% of customers also expect companies to provide some form of self-service on their customer support portal. By that same token, if you consider employees or workers in your organization to be as dependent on search. They consider -- so by that same token, you could look at the impact of search experiences on your employees as they look for information. So on average, 1.8 hours is wasted per day by employees searching for information. And 60% of knowledge workers spend more time digging for documents than they do replying to e-mail or messages, and 58% of the employees say that a quick search profiles is a top 3 enabler for remote work. And remote work is really here to stay because 49% of HR leaders expect to continue to hire remote workers even beyond the pandemic. So as you can see, customer and employee satisfaction is really dependent on enabling people to find the best and most relevant answer at every single interaction, and they need to do this in the face of this kind of ongoing explosion of data and information that's happening in the world at the moment. So every day, search becomes more and more important and no organization or company is immune from that because search is really at the heart of all businesses now. So this is where Elastic Enterprise Search can add a huge amount of value to any organization. We can provide an external search platform for customers and partners looking for public information that you need to make available to them or we can provide a search platform for employees unlocking the value of data on your internal platforms and making it so much easier for them to find information to do their jobs. So let's look at a search for customers or partners. By creating a consistent and rich search experience across all of your touch points, Elastic Enterprise Search can help you drive up conversion, improve customer satisfaction as well as brand perception can also encourage repeat business and help you be more responsive to trends and issues as you analyze what people are searching for and how they're finding it. It can also drive down support costs by doing things like answering questions for your community or your customers without them needing to engage with your help desk to do it. We would consider external search to be applicable across things like your corporate website, a customer support portal, your mobile app or even the community sites. We can also help speed up recruitment of key talent by enabling an effective search environment on a career site. And we can also help your partners to find products and solutions on your partner portal more effectively. Elastic App search is advanced search made simple. Think about it for a second, how much complexity goes into building a really great search experience. You have a reliance on developers multiple systems potentially bringing data together. There may be data models that are not compatible with each other. And there maybe just an enormous sprawl of data, which slows your queries down, for example. Well, luckily, Elasticsearch solves this problem and has been solving this problem for years now. Elasticsearch is a world-class search platform and has been implemented in countless projects around the world. What we're able to do with Elastic App Search, though is abstract the capability and the complexity of building a search experience that Elasticsearch can offer into something very, very simple to deploy and to manage and to implement on an ongoing basis. So it's, as I mentioned, backed by Elasticsearch available with relevancy models, which are optimized for real life search. We offer features like typo-tolerant, typeahead as well as faceted. We give our administrators the ability to fine-grain and fine-tune their search experience with other reliance and developers that can do it all through a user interface, and we provide robust analytics so that the custodians of search can really see what people are searching for whether or not they're finding the information that they're looking for or if the organization needs to pivot towards a alternative product set or maybe add something to their catalog in response to what their customers want. In addition, Elastic App search is made with a really simple to implement search you app, which is a react library that you really just deploy into your existing front end. So we abstract the complexity of having to build a whole new user interface, and we can also allow you to have curated search capabilities. So it's not like a set of configurations or settings applied globally, you can actually curate that and target a certain set of users or a certain content source to focus and to process searches and produce results differently based on your own requirements. Elastic App search also has the Elastic web crawler, which is an intelligent and intuitive indexing tools. Some of the most complex and the highest level of complexity around implementing a search experience is really trying to get all that information into a search index. But with the web crawler, it's the easiest way to simplify your document ingestion capability. It also significantly reduces your time to value by not having to worry about ingesting different data sources connecting to separate data sources that maybe system owners do not want to expose to your application, which leads to a reduced dependence on other teams. There's also a flexible management of capabilities at all levels of administration. It means that you don't need to have specialist skills to set your search experience up and to fine-tune it and to curate it going forward. Okay. So let's turn the lens to the internal parts of your company and look at the benefits of a search for employees. So by empowering people to find information anywhere in your organization using a single search box, you can perform or achieve a number of outcomes. Employee productivity, for example, goes up because people can find information much faster and they tend to be more satisfied. Also when onboarding new employees, you can make that process a lot easier and a lot faster by having information just much more available through a single search rather than having to go through the structures of, let's say, an internal folder or a wiki and having to perform searches on all of those platforms individually. So we see the ability to connect all of these internal productivity platforms like help desks and knowledge bases, sales tools and internet wiki's those kinds of productivity platforms that people are reliant on every single day, connecting them with a single search bar and really helps to improve collaboration and help people make high-quality decisions and reduce duplication of efforts and wasting time. There is a concept of institutional knowledge, which is very much underrated because every time someone learns something, documents it, puts it in place, and it doesn't get referenced and someone else has to learn that and document it and put it in place, there's a massive duplication of efforts. So we see the ability to make this information easily available through a single search operation extremely valuable. And especially when teams can cross collaborate, for example, support teams and development teams as well as leadership can basically get access to data that they may not normally know where to go find it. And that will help them to make much better decisions and collaborate more effectively. So as valuable as an external search platform is for partners and customers as valuable an internal search platform is because it just drives the productivity and the effectiveness of an organization so well. So how does Elastic enable this? Well, we have with Elastic Enterprise Search a solution called Workplace Search. And really what this provides is knowledge at your team's fingertips. So we have this capability of ingesting content from -- connecting content from multiple sources inside your organization, and centralizing that data and then compartmentalizing the access. So we don't break any of the existing security rules that are in place. Users can search for terms. So if you look at the sort of previous screen, you can see that they've searched for a contract, and we can bring the results back for that search term, but limited to the data sources that they have access to as well as within the security constraints and the role-based access controls that are in place already. If a team, for example, doesn't need access to a specific source, so let's call it GitHub and it's the finance team. You can arrange that team so that team doesn't have access to GitHub. You can remove that from the available content sources. So there's -- it's a lot of rigor that's in place, but they still get the ability to search across all of their available data sources in 1 operation. And the search experience itself is what users would be expecting. So keyword-based filtering, the ability to typeahead as well as type based on previous searches that are being performed and also be typo tolerant. So the actual internal search platform or search experience is no less impressive or seamless than the external search experience as well. And really, this also drives a lot more productivity through unified relevance across different sources. So for example, if I'm looking for a contract, and I can provide that contract to the company name and the contract. I can look across all of my sources, and I can get results that are ranked by relevance, they're not necessarily ranked in order of the data source or when last update, it's ranked through a number of key relevant factors. So -- and those are selectable by the user as well. So that really drives much better search experiences and improved productivity because these employees are not having to go into SharePoint, Gmail drop box and actually look for these documents in each of those unique content sources. The GMail source by the way, naturally would be only that uses inbox, which is a really great way to compartmentalize what's relevant to me as an individual as well as what's relevant to the entire organization. Great search experiences can be achieved by applying the unique power of Elastic to critical elements of search. User experience is an important key piece of providing a great overall search experience to your users. They're expecting things like typo tolerance and natural language support, autocomplete and term suggestions to make finding easy. As a search owner or an admin on the platform, you're looking for insights and analytics. What is your customers and your partners searching for. So we provide powerful customizable visualization tools as well as give you machine learning-driven insights at your fingertips to drive continuous improvements. Search management is particularly easy because you're not dependent on developers, database admins to fine-tune your relevance and results. So that really empowers your business users through simplified administration tools to unify content even across multiple sites and curate the way that the search experience is delivered per audience. Our ingestion tools make it really easy to get data into the platform. So a frictionless setup, out-of-the-box connectors, a very powerful web crawler and an extensible API enable shorter time to value. Obviously, your search isn't particularly relevant if you don't have data in your search platform, we make it very easy to get data in using our ingestion tools. And then lastly, our security platform or the security of Elastic allows you to have granular -- fine-grained controls over who has access to data, and you can see specific search results. And in addition, Elastic is certified, has a number of certifications for most security standards, and that gives you a real peace of mind in leveraging our solutions. So let's take a look at the Elasticsearch platform, which underpins our enterprise search solution. So Elasticsearch, that's very simplest form, is a search engine, it is a distributed search engine. So data essentially is deployed and ingested and split out into a cluster. So it's extremely scalable and is highly performant. So no matter what the quantity of data is, and I suppose the unique circumstances of your data types, Elasticsearch can respond to search queries incredibly quickly because it's horizontally scaled. So we don't have challenges around monolithic or vertical scale databases, which would be challenges of the past or restrictions on grade search experiences previously. The way to visualize data and Elasticsearch is through Kibana and that's really where administration of the platform happens, exploration of data, visualization of data and just engaging with your data as well as where you would engage with enterprise search, for example. That all happens in Kibana, which is really the window into the Elastic Stack. And then we have an integration layer where it's easy to connect to data sources or collect data from other platforms as well as perform operations like alerting when specific rules are met, for example. So in addition to enterprise search, just a quick note, we also have an observability solution, which is built on the stack and a security solution. And the most important thing about the Elastic stack is that we have 1 licensing model. So we have different levels of licensing. But the way we license really allows you to make use of all of these solutions under a single license. So you can use Elastic for search operations or search an enterprise search solution as well as monitoring, collecting logs, doing application performance management of your application as well as looking at your data and providing a security platform. So -- responding to security events, hunting for threats, for example. So we have other resources that we'll share more information about our observability and security solutions. It is really important to understand that this 1 platform can do these different things, which are traditionally seen as silos with other platforms. These are considered core capabilities of the Elastic Stack. The last thing to note is that the Elastic Stack meet you where your data is, we can be consumed from public cloud platforms through the Elastic Cloud service. We can also deploy in hybrid environments where the company might be migrating to the cloud to have infrastructure on-premise, they never need to have a cluster on-premise as well as deploying to the cloud. And then we can have exclusively on-premise what we call self-managed Elastic clusters, which are within your data center. So we really have the ability to align with what your organization needs. So if we look at just some of the industry recognition that we've received, Elastic basically on the Forrester Wave for search -- cognitive search, sorry, has been named a leader. And we received the top score and strategy category, as well as the highest possible scores in 12 criteria, including ingestion, usability and analytics, tuning scale and market awareness. So this just gives you peace of mind to know that not only is elastic, I suppose, recognized as other market as an incredible platform to build search solutions out of, but also by the analysts that are constantly watching that market and producing reports. So let's take a look at some of the customers that have been using Elastic Enterprise Search to drive their business forward. HappyFresh is an online grocery retailer in Southeast Asia, and they had a search solution that it could scale I mean it just couldn't match the increase in demand that they were seeing post the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. So Elastic app search basically helped them to achieve their goals of providing a richer search experience for their online and mobile shopping platforms. It supported their ability to grow and scale and increased conversion and reduced the amount of abandoned virtual carts as well in that sales cycle and also improved performance overall. The solution that they chose was Elastic App Search, and they got 10x the increase in web traffic. They got a 3x increase in search traffic and they also achieved a 2x decrease in search latency. So overall, Elastic App Search was able to meet their growing scale demands as well as provide a much improved user experience to their shoppers. So the next case study of Cisco, who created a next-generation customer experience and self-service platform. Cisco is 1 of the largest networking companies in the world, and they wanted to deliver a high-end post-sale support to both the partners as well as customers. They also wanted to achieve high-speed searches and availability and scale across more than 2 billion assets. So the scale of Elasticsearch really came in handy in order to accommodate this massive amount of assets that needed to be searched by customers and partners. So Cisco deployed Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud, and they optimized search functionality and scalability and they provided the self-service search capability for the My Cisco Entitlements portal. They currently have achieved subsecond response times. They've got high availability through our cloud platform and they've got the scalability to grow for billions of assets and beyond as they can grow dynamically in the elastic cloud environment. So Elastic Enterprise Search allows you to search everything, anywhere, both customers and partners for external data and employees for internal data. Users can answer every question right every time they get the most relevant results for their search queries and search is simplified, not only for end users and the amount of complexity to search assets, but also for using organization to run a search experience and to curate search experiences internally. Our low-code tools and our advent interfaces make it very simple to deliver a world-class search environment. And we allow you to scale and adapt to add more interactions with a single platform and not be held back or put off by large volumes of data that might slow other platforms down. Right, so we've almost reached the end of this session. But a few notes, just before I go, -- the first is 1 of the most effective ways to learn about our solutions and products is to go on one of these elastic training courses, many of which are offered completely free of charge and a lot of which are undermined. We do have some instructor-led virtual sessions. But for the most part, on demand and free is the way to go if you want to learn more about one of our solutions. So I would highlight the app search fundamentals, for example, a really good way to learn more about app search and how it can help you beyond what I've covered in this webinar now. The next thing would be just to highlight the easiest and simplest way to deploy a solution like this, what a tested out would be by going on to the Elastic Cloud and deploying any 1 of the 3 major cloud vendors and managed Elasticsearch and Kibana stack with the Elastic Enterprise Search node deploy as well. You can scale these assets as you need. So based on the amount to date that you want to store -- and you also have a no obligation 14-day trial that doesn't require a credit card to activate. The Elastic Cloud service or Elasticsearch service and an Elastic Cloud basically allows it to have complete control over the size and the scale of a cluster in a single console. You can do in-place upgrades, and you can add capacity seamlessly without downtime. We provide you with automatic snapshots for backups, although you can configure your own retention cycles. And you can also enable monitoring so that you can monitor your wider real estate in Kibana. The Elastic Cloud is maintained to a widely accepted compliance standards. So we have these certifications and we're continually aligning and going through an auditing process. So you can deploy with peace of mind. So with that said, I think I would just like to say thank you very much for listening to this session. It's greatly appreciated. Please reach out to us if you need to know anything more about how Elastic Enterprise Search can assist you in a search organization in providing amazing search experiences with all of the benefits that we've covered today. Thank you very much.